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2 Two Terrors, One Problem Ken Booth The starting point of my argument is that when it comes to the theory and practice of security, we have seen the past and it did not work. To advance this proposition, I want to make three further claims: that human society is confronted by a world-historical crisis and not just a temporary period of international turmoil; that the interacting dynamics of the states system and globalization are producing generally negative consequences; and that a significant part of today’s crisis in human society arises from dualistic thinking. The discussion will finally be crystallized around the continuing relevance of Mark Twain’s idea of ‘Two Terrors’ reigning at the time of the French Revolution. WHERE ARE WE NOW? To begin, I want to make five general claims about the grim state of human society in world-historical perspective (Booth, 2000a). Proposition one: human society is not as far along the path of progress as many would like to think. It is sobering to realize that for the greater part of human history the most intelligent people of their era believed that the earth was flat. How will today’s most intelligent people look to historians in 500 or 2000 year’s time? Will contemporary society, like our distant ancestors, be seen as primitive? I believe this is likely, and the key area will be the destructive relationship humans have developed with the rest of the natural world. We will surely appear as flat-earthers to distant generations—denying evident realities—as, in a blink of historical time, we destroy the environmental bounty it has taken millions of years to create. To those future generations for whom the tiger will be a mythical creature, for whom fish will be fewer and farmed, for whom the climate will be an unpredictable threat, and for whom agricultural land will be ever-more scarce, the primitive behavior of twentieth-century humankind will attract particular scorn. 27 Proposition two: the self-image of Western elites as decent people is seriously flawed. It is commonplace to hear people sneer at ancient Greek philosophers, pointing out that their distinguished culture was built on a slave economy. How can we take the ethical systems of such ‘hypocrites’ seriously? But are we any better today? If history does sneer, nobody can complain. In truth, we are worse than the ancient Greeks; their ethical systems did not include slaves as equals. We have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as one of the many measures of our hypocrisy. Despite the supposedly more egalitarian global culture of this era, there is a global “dictatorship of the rich” ruled over by the West. At the bottom of the pile live one billion people in absolute poverty, while the richest 225 individuals have a combined wealth equivalent to the annual income of 47% of the whole population (UNDP, 1998: 30).Those living in what J. K. Galbraith calls the culture of contentment (1992) are far removed from the real lives of most humans on earth. The wiring of the world is celebrated—with huge annual increments in the hundreds of millions of telephone sets already in existence—but the minority owning multiple sets seems unaware that most people on earth have never dialed a friend. According to U.N. figures, the additional annual cost of education for everybody on earth would be 6 billion dollars; 8 billion dollars is spent annually on cosmetics in the United States alone (UNDP, 1998: 37). In global society, the spirit of Marie Antoinette is alive and well. Proposition three: human society is presently at the start of the first truly global age. The context for living, globally, is being reinvented in radical ways. We are in the first stages of one of the most decisive periods of human history, comparable with the invention of tools or the Industrial Revolution. This is the first truly global age—one of those step-changes in the human graph, leading to the reinvention of space, time, boundaries, economics, identities, and politics (Booth, 1998: 338–355). Globalization refers to a set of dynamics that became manifest in the final decades of the last century: the transnational organization of production, the liberalization of markets, the growth of world cities, the spread of advanced information technology, the 24–hour global financial system, changing consumption patterns and expectations, pressures on family and emotional life, the penetration of cultural norms and political authority, the disruption of local communities...

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